As is known, looking for fragrances, notably with a view to narrowing down a consumer choice, involves testing several fragrances in order ultimately to settle upon a given fragrance.
To do this, it is common practice to use strips of absorbent paper (in the field of perfumery, these are often referred to as “test strips”). More specifically, the demonstrator will present such strips in turn to her potential customer after having a sprayed onto them a small amount of one of the fragrances between which the choice is to be made.
However, such an approach has the disadvantage of entailing, for each fragrance, spraying an amount that often exceeds the amount that the strip of paper can absorb, thus leading to product losses (product vaporized beside the strip), to the risk of the formation of unsightly drips, to uncontrolled loading of each strip (some may be saturated while others are loaded with barely any perfume), making it difficult to compare the strength of the various fragrances, and also causing the environment to become progressively laden with all the fragrances tested, this gradually clouding one's perception of the new fragrances being proposed.
It should be noted that the fact that the strips are used just once means that the product remaining on the strip is thrown away when it has not yet completely evaporated.
Furthermore, use of simple strips of paper to present perfume, does not always allow the potential customer to be placed in the right frame of mind for evaluating the sophistication of the fragrances being proposed, especially in the case of luxury perfumes.
One special use of such strips has been proposed, which involves combining them with a bell-shaped dome placed on a flat surface and in the end of which the strip of paper is temporarily attached. This allows the strip of paper to release the fragrance with which it is loaded into the entire volume of the bell-shaped dome, thus allowing the potential customer to take a deep breath of the fragrance in order to assess the qualities thereof. However, such a solution takes up a significant amount of space on the flat surface in question, and does nothing to avoid mix-ups once a number of bell-shaped domes have been handled.
Another proposal has been to place impregnated cloths in enclosures which are successively opened up so that the cloths can be taken out and handled and the fragrances with which they are impregnated evaluated, but the disadvantage with that is that the demonstrator's fingers become saturated with the successive fragrances.
There is therefore a need to be able to present fragrances, such as perfumes, while minimizing product losses (which do nothing to assist with evaluating the product in question) and the risks of the surrounding atmosphere becoming inappropriately laden with perfume, while at the same time guaranteeing a certain consistency in how a given fragrance is presented and at the same time allowing the demonstrator to enact a certain amount of ceremony in demonstrating a plurality of fragrances; in practice, the aforementioned consistency corresponds to an objective to release the fragrance concerned in a pure and faithful manner, this entailing both storing the fragrance correctly and, at the opportune moment, reproducibly releasing this fragrance.